Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!ox-prg!fleck
From: fleck@cressida.ecs.ox.ac.uk (Margaret Fleck)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Experiment: empirical tests
Message-ID: <970@culhua.prg.ox.ac.uk>
Date: 3 Dec 90 18:29:03 GMT
References: <7852@uwm.edu> <1990Nov26.055429.8883@agate.berkeley.edu> <7989@uwm.edu>
Sender: news@prg.ox.ac.uk
Organization: Robotics Research Group, Engineering Science Dept, Oxford, UK.
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>A very similar situation is going on collectively with researchers who are
>progressively deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphic text ... and recently there has
>been some success at partially undercovering the meaning of the symbols.

It's been a few years since I was last up-to-date with research in
that area.  However, external knowledge was definitely used in early
stages of the decipherment, including (at least):

  (1) A pseudo-alphabet surviving from the Spanish conquest, critical
      in early stages of breaking the phonetic parts of the sign system.
  (2) Knowledge of living Mayan languages, including meanings of words
      in them (since some of the bits of signs are phonetic).  Information
      from related languages was also used in deciphering many of the
      ancient Near Eastern languages.  A big exception was Sumerian, 
      not closely related to any known language, for which explicit
      dictionaries (from Akkadian) were available.
  (3) Surviving knowledge of the calendar system, some of which is *still*
      in use by certain Indian groups.   The modern languages also preserve
      the base 20 number system.
  (4) Semantic cues in the form of signs, e.g. one of the two systems of
      numbers has a really obvious structure of bars and dots.
  (5) Modern astonomical knowledge, used to pin down dates for events
      reported in the texts and check hypotheses that certain texts
      referred to astronomical events.  
  (6) Knowledge about what humans write on inscriptions:  a big breakthrough
      came when someone noticed that certain sequences of dates fit the
      pattern of birth, death, and accession dates for a sequence of
      rulers.  If all the surviving texts had been abstract poetry, they
      would have been much harder to decipher.

A lot of information about the pattern of signs was extracted by
simply examining lots of text.  This is a good method, for example, of
getting preliminary ideas about which patterns of lines represent the
same character.  (Not obvious at first glance for e.g. the head-shaped
numbers in Mayan hieroglyphics.)  But the decipherment proper--the
matching of symbols to meanings--used external information.

Margaret Fleck (Oxford)


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